3 Body Problem is the kind of TV epic we need
When Game of Thrones ended in May 2019, the hunt was in full swing for a series that could rival the blockbuster scale. HBO was already in discussions about spin-offs with George RR Martin, while Netflix’s The witcherDisneys The MandalorianApples FoundationParamount Plus’ Halo, and Amazon’s mega-budget for a Lord of the Rings prequel bubbled up at various stages of development and production. Five years later, all the shows exist, but there is no clear champion. Even reactions to HBO’s prequel, House of the Dragonwere more wave claps than calls for the second coming of a franchise.
What the would-be successors have proven (that everyone seemed to know at the time, except IP-hungry managers?) is that Thrones‘ The secret was not the scale, but the substantive drama. A great show needs characters with big questions and big goals, but with down-to-earth emotions. The balance of a continent could depend on brave knights, ancient prophecy and dragon battles, as long as those involved got angry, it felt like real people got angry. For all the finals-related nonsense, Thrones showrunners David Benioff and DB Weiss were given the time and space to adapt the human side of Martin’s elaborate story and the set pieces. So it’s no surprise that while the rest of Hollywood chased the tentpoles, Benioff and Weiss put aside their boyhood dreams of making a Star Wars movie (phew, crisis averted) to cash in their chips for a deal where they could demand time and space and quality work without swordplay.
And they actually did it: collaborate with veteran TV writer Alexander Woo (The terror season 2), their new Netflix series 3 Body problemlike it Thrones, feels epic in scale as it explores the messiness of human instinct. Movies like Interstellar And Solaris ventured into deep space to confront our innate spirituality, but 3 Body problem Season 1 stays close to home for the benefit of the characters, who juggle romantic relationships, work stress, and impending doom. Yet that is true something alien out there in the universe, a cosmic unknown. Benioff, Weiss and Woo treat that promise like a chemical pipetted into a petri dish. Just a few drops of knowledge cause an immediate reaction with consequences that will only be felt hundreds of years into the future.
Image: Netflix
The showrunner trio adapts Liu Cixin’s famous science fiction trilogy Remembrance of Earth’s Past with both reverence and an eye for the narrative economy. The core drama of 3 Body problem Season 1, focused on a group of physicists who want to understand what the heck is going on in the universe, weaves together people, places, and things from all three books to be propulsive yet easily digestible. Die-hard readers may miss Liu’s dense “far out, man” core style, but the pillar moments remain. The first episodes range from the Chinese Cultural Revolution to modern-day London and virtual reality landscapes that hold the key to greater mysteries. The thorny politics of solving Earth’s dangerous future lurks throughout the timelines. Benioff, Weiss and Woo pull no punches as they work through the plot, relying on genre conventions to keep it all watchable. (British mysteries such as Broadkerk And Happy Valley feel as much part of the show’s DNA as any sci-fi series.)
Perhaps a ten or twelve episode season would have made room for deeper character work, but the writers managed to make every line of dialogue illustrative of their characters’ deeper motivations, and every silent gesture – gazing at the stars, gasping for comparisons . , even watching a kid play Mortal Kombat – speaks volumes. Unlike recent Netflix adaptations that have crammed long stories into uncompromising runtimes by removing all the downtime ‘fillers’. 3 Body problem is full of the idiosyncrasies of humanity. The show features religious fanatics, angsty nerds, quiet romantics and Benedict Wong as a no-bullshit cop. There’s a lot of nonsense about quantum physics and gravitational interactions, but also one of the best on-screen meet-my-family awkward dinner dates in recent memory.
Doing MrActor Jess Hong’s work is a relative newcomer and the center of everything 3 Body problem‘s narrative threads. In a cast full Game of Thrones veterans and big screen talent like Wong and Eiza González (Baby driver, Godzilla vs. Kong), Hong takes on the task of making all of the show’s alien twists feel completely natural. Whether her character, Jin, is sipping a beer and having a bar chat or navigating the immersive third level of the least fun virtual puzzle game ever invented, she reflects an authentic reality increasingly challenged by the show’s idiosyncrasies. 3 Body problem ultimately the question is whether we deserve the planet we have ruined so many times. Hong’s Jin, in all her ups and downs, radiates the kind of humanity we want to believe in.
It really helps that Netflix hasn’t cut corners 3 Body problem, which, for all its character drama, goes big when it needs to go big. Benioff and Weiss’s influence has bought them the kind of top-tier production value that I thought only David Fincher could master; flashbacks to 1960s/70s China feel rich in detail, while scenes from the contemporary drama have a refined feel, rather than the cheap digital gloss that plagued so many post-Fincher Netflix projects. Anyone haunted by terrible depictions of VR in movies and TV will be relieved by the show’s deliberately creepy, often fantastical digital worlds that look like real Unreal Engine survival game backgrounds. And when 3 Body problem When you get into high sci-fi gear, the show becomes truly mind-boggling – and often gnarly. The dazzling provocateurs who orchestrated the Red Wedding are definitely at the helm of this series.
I’m a little in awe of it 3 Body problem. Liu’s books are like a character study of humanity itself; there is inherently too much to chew on. But Benioff, Weiss and Woo showed up ready to cook. Their adaptation is gripping from the start and already prioritizes the pieces needed for a cohesive endgame. From the information pages of the trilogy they have extracted a visual story, dazzling and frightening. There are nits to pick from episode to episode, leaps in logic that may not stand up to scrutiny, but it’s a show that, unlike the Game of Thrones imitators, dragged me along. Most of those shows revolved around escapism. 3 Body problem feels like a real escape, an excuse to wonder about the vastness of the cosmos from the comfort of your couch and wonder, What if?
3 Body problem premieres on Netflix on March 21.